Wayland is a computer protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a reference implementation of the protocol in the C programming language.

Wayland's main goal is replacing the X Window System with a modern, simpler windowing system in Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The project's source code is published under the terms of the MIT License, a permissive free software licence.

As part of its efforts, the Wayland project also develops a reference implementation of a Wayland compositor called Weston.

Testing

To test Wayland, you will need to have a compatible compositor installed. A Wayland compositor combines the roles of the X window manager, compositing manager and display server. Weston is the reference implementation of the concept, but each desktop environment implements their own composition manager.

You can test weston directly from a regular X session with the following commands:

sudo apt install weston
weston

This will start a Wayland window in your regular X session where you can test things.

Note that any X program will still run, as there is a XWayland server that provides backwards compatibility with X program. Those programs will not, however, benefit from the security and performance improvements Wayland provides.

Partially supported

Emacs: because Emacs is not a real GTK apps, it still talks with X11 and therefore will use XWayland